CES: 7,000 Square Feet Dedicated to 3-D Printing

By Tiernan Ray

I'm at the Mandalay Bay Hotel's convention center in Las Vegas for the first press event of the Consumer Electronics Show 2014, a presentation by The Association's Shawn DuBravac. All his slides are available online.

DuBravac starts off by making the case for a “third industrial revolution,” one of mass-customization. He brings up specifically 3-D printing. It is still a young market, with perhaps just 100,000 3-D printers likely to be sold this year. But there will be 7,000 square feet of exhibition space this week at the show dedicated to the field. 3D Systems (DDD) is among the 3-D printing heavy hitters that will be watched closely this week.

Moving on to computing devices, DuBravac notes that there had been a “void” back in 2009 between devices with 5-inch screens, and laptops with 15-inch screens and above. Of course, he says, Apple (AAPL) introduced the iPad in 2010, filling that void. There will probably be 270 million tablets shipped this year. At the lower end of screen size, smart watches and other “wearables” are proliferating. And at the high end, “Ultra-HD,” or 4K television sets.

This week will also see bendable screens, thong he cautions “it may be another five to ten years before it becomes commercially viable.” Think of the history of the Xerox “Star” graphical user interface, which didn't become viable commercially but inspired Apple's first Macintosh computer.

Ultra-HD sold about 60,000 units in the U.S. last year, and that will probably rise to half a million this year. It may be 2 million to 2.5 million units globally this year.

“We'll see a number of announcements around media boxes, and services,” he notes, and some vendors, such as LG Electronics, will be showing more than a dozen Ultra-HD units.

Smartwatches may shop one million units this year in the U.S., up from half a million last year, and 1.5 million worldwide, up from one million last year.

DuBravac says the world is entering an “age of autonomy” as a consequence of an expansion of the deployment of sensors. That includes sensors in thermostats, for example. “We're now just starting to deploy these sensors and think about how we use them.” He traces the first consumer use of sensors to Nokia's (NOK) use of an accelerometer in a phone back in 2006. The cost of an accelerometer back then was $7, whereas it's now 50 cents, he observes.

An example is cameras on the front of cars that send information about the road to the cruise control system. Things such as “lane assist” alert drivers if they veer off the road, using a combination of software and sensors. The same for automatic parking, where one takes one's hands off the wheel. “We started to solve very discrete problems,” he says, “and then we put them together.”

In 2000, only about 4% of households had broadband connectivity. Today, most U.S. households have broadband connections if they have connectivity at all. That offers the prospect for more complex home automation, such as things that go beyond the Nest thermostat and actually combine info about the home with info about where you are in relation to your home, using your smartphone positioning.

He mentions a startup, Tobii, as an example of new uses of eye tracking.

There is now a plethora of radio types for every possible connection range — Bluetooth, Zigbee, Ant, etc.

Constant feedback through wireless allows a system to make “constant adjustments” — “so, my thermostat adjusting as I get closer to home,” he offers. Sensors for inventory levels at a retail location that can help the system change prices as inventory goes up or down.

DuBravac imagines things such as sensors that pick out a movie for you based on what the temperature is outside, or your current heart rate. It's the meeting of services and systems.

“We're going to see a lot of exploration this week of just what sensors can do,” he says.

Someone asks a question about the video game console market. It is a “pretty mature” market now at about 51% of households today. It probably won't expand much beyond that in coming years, opines DuBravac, perhaps just a couple percentage points. Hence, the push by Microsoft (MSFT) and others to offer more services on top of the basic box business.

Someone asks about privacy, Snowden, the NSA and the whole matter of intrusion. He's fairly dismissive of the whole matter of privacy per se. People are more and more willing to give up their information, he observes, and anyway, once upon a time in small town America, one didn't really have privacy anyway. “I'm just not as interested, I guess, as some people who really are concerned with privacy,” says DuBravac.

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There are 3 comments

JANUARY 6, 2014 1:37 A.M.

Really? wrote:

Not even a mention that Microsoft stores are already selling 3D printers. This is yesterdays news...Yawn...

JANUARY 6, 2014 1:41 A.M.

Apple is king wrote:

So what...Apple will make 3D printing cool...

JANUARY 6, 2014 9:36 A.M.

Ryan Gadz wrote:

Why is Apple even mentioned in an article about 3d printing? I had tablets well before 2009 they were just expensive and not marketed well. Companies like Corning and Qualcomm made modern tablets possible not Apple.

About Tech Trader Daily

Tech Trader Daily is a blog on technology investing written by Barron’s veteran Tiernan Ray. The blog provides news, analysis and original reporting on events important to investors in software, hardware, the Internet, telecommunications and related fields. Comments and tips can be sent to: techtraderdaily@barrons.com.